In the morning twilight of Wednesday, March 10th, 1948, the limp
body of Jan Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's popular and
charismatic foreign minister, was discovered in the courtyard of the
seventeenth-century Czernin Palace. The body lay on the stone
pavement some 50 feet below the bathroom window of his official
apartment in the Foreign Office Building.

Six hours later, the Communist-dominated government of Klement
Gottwald broadcast to the world that Masaryk's death had been an act
of suicide. The tragic news was transmitted on New York's 7 A.M.
news. After allowing Prague-based correspondents to file their
dispatches, the Czechoslovak government severed all communications
with the outside world.

Shortly thereafter, Jan Papánek, the Czechoslovak ambassador to
the United Nations, leaked to some correspondents in his office his
view that Masaryk had been murdered. Papánek later officially
requested UN secretary-general Trygve Lie to call an emergency
meeting of the Security Council. His note demanded a debate on his
charges of a foreign-directed seizure of power in Prague, resulting in
the destruction of Czechoslovakia's national independence and
thereby creating a threat to world peace. At the accompanying press
conference, he rehearsed his reading of the Czechoslovak crisis and,
at the end, voiced disbelief of the suicide story.

Whatever the accuracy may be of the conflicting versions of his
death, Masaryk must be perceived as a victim of the Cold War. His
premature demise inflamed the intensity of the rival power polemics,

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